1. Field of the Invention
The invention pertains to the field of plasma display panels. More particularly, the invention pertains to using glass structures, such as fiber, to construct a plasma display panel.
2. Description of Related Art
Plasma display panels (PDP) have been around for about 30 years, however they have not seen widespread commercial use. The main reasons are the short lifetime, low efficiency, and cost of the color plasma displays. Most of the performance issues were solved with the invention of the three electrode surface discharge AC plasma display (G. W. Dick, xe2x80x9cThree-Electrode per PEL AC Plasma Display Panelxe2x80x9d, 1985 International Display Research Conf., pp. 45-50; U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,554,537, 4,728,864, 4,833,463, 5,086,297, 5,661,500, and 5,674,553). The new three electrode surface discharge structure, FIG. 1, advances many technical attributes of the display, but its complex manufacturing process and detailed structure makes manufacturing complicated and costly. The traditional method of manufacturing limits the display to small plasma cells (1 mmxc3x970.3 mmxc3x970.15 mm high) which will limit their applications to small displays ( less than 80xe2x80x3 diagonal). This limitation in plasma cell size will also limit the efficiency of the display because of the short firing distance (small if any positive column) and large surface area to volume ratio, which creates a lot of quenching of the plasma. (Note: The positive column in a plasma is the section where the number of electrons equals the number of ionized atoms. Fluorescent lights have a luminous efficiency of 80 lum/W, whereas when the positive column is shrunk down from 3 feet to 50 xcexcm the luminous efficiency is reduced to around 1 lum/W.)
A number of methods have been proposed to create the structure in a plasma display, such as thin and thick film processing, photolithography, silk screening, sand blasting, and embossing. However, none of the structure forming techniques allows for the formation of medium (0.1 mm3 to 5 mm3) to large (5 mm3 and up) plasma cells. Several methods to produce the structure in a plasma display using fiber-like structures have been suggested and displays fabricated. Small hollow tubes were first used to create structure in a panel by W. Mayer, xe2x80x9cTubular AC Plasma Panels,xe2x80x9d 1972 IEEE Conf. Display Devices, Conf. Rec., New York, pp. 15-18, and R. Storm, xe2x80x9c32-Inch Graphic Plasma Display Module,xe2x80x9d 1974 SID Int. Symposium, San Diego, pp. 122-123, and included in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,964,050 and 4,027,188. These early applications where focused on using an array of gas filled hollow tubes to produce the rib structure in a PDP. In addition, this work focused on adding the electrode structure to the glass plates that sandwiched the gas filled hollow tubes.
Since this early investigation no further work was published on further developing a fiber or tube technology until that published by C. Moore and R. Schaeffler, xe2x80x9cFiber Plasma Displayxe2x80x9d, SID ""97 Digest, pp. 1055-1058. This work integrated the wire electrode(s) into glass fibers to produce the structure in a display, as shown in FIG. 2. A U.S. Pat. No. 5,984,747 GLASS STRUCTURES FOR INFORMATION DISPLAYS was granted covering this technology and is incorporated herein by reference. Using fibers to create the structure in the display will have problems when scaling to larger sizes because of the locations of the address and sustain electrode. A new structure will have to be invented to create the firing over longer distances and create a high enough electric field to address the display.
Another fiber-based plasma display patent application Ser. No. 09/299,370 FIBER-BASED PLAMSA DISPLAYS also covers many different techniques for manufacturing a plasma display, some of which will hold true no matter what the size and is incorporated herein by reference. The manufacturing of the plasma display covered under patent applications Ser. Nos. 09/299,350 and 09/299,371 entitled PROCESS FOR MAKING ARRAY OF FIBERS USED IN FIBER-BASED DISPLAYS and FRIT-SEALING PROCESS USED IN MAKING DISPLAYS will be capable of producing any multiple strand arrayed plasma display and are incorporated herein by reference.
The invention is to use at least two orthogonal arrays of complicated shaped glass rods or very large fibers-like structures (from here in referred to as fibers) with wire electrodes to fabricate plasma displays with plasma cells larger than 0.05 mm3 in volume. (The volume of a plasma cell is defined by the width of the plasma channel times the height of the plasma channel times the pitch of the pair of sustain electrodes.) In order to fabricate working plasma displays the structure of the top and bottom fibers are modified from previously suggested displays.
By increasing the size of the fibers in the above mentioned patent application will create a very long addressing distance, d, in the bottom fiber. This addressing distance, d, in typical plasma displays and those discussed in the above patent and patent application are typically 100 xcexcm to 150 xcexcm. The addressing electrode is used to add to the total electric field in the plasma channel to ignite the plasma. As the distance d between the address electrode and sustain electrodes (located just above the top of the bottom fiber) is increased, by increasing the size of the bottom fiber, the electric field decreases, thus a larger voltage is required to address the plasma. To increase the size of the bottom fiber and keep the addressing voltage constant or to reduce the addressing voltage, the address electrode is moved from the bottom of the channel up into the barrier rib. Moving the address electrode up into the barrier rib will reduce the distance, d, between the address electrode and the sustain electrodes, thus increasing the electric field of the addressing pulse. To maintain a more uniform addressing field and build redundancy into the display an additional address electrode can be included in the barrier rib wall on the other side of the plasma channel.